White-box cryptography is aimed at protecting secret keys from being disclosed in a software implementation of a cryptographic or secure function. In such a context, it is assumed that the attacker (usually a “legitimate” user or malicious software) may also control the execution environment of the software implementation. This is in contrast with the more traditional security model where the attacker is only given a black-box access (i.e., inputs/outputs) to the cryptographic function under consideration.
The main idea of white-box implementations is to rewrite a key-instantiated version so that all information related to the key is hidden in the software implementation of the cryptographic or secure function. In other words, for each secret key, a key-customized software is implemented so that the key input is unnecessary. In other embodiments, the secret key may be an input to the white-box implementation. In such a case the key may be encoded.